Somebody, and I can’t remember who (so treat this as a straw argument if you want), argued with me a while back that there was a problem with open access because it was driven by technological possibility. That I wanted people to be able to read things without paying because technology made it possible was apparently a bad thing because, ya know, technology. Now, I’m not actually averse to thinking critically about technology.
I’m probably not the first to think these thoughts, but I thought I would write them anyway as they are fresh in my mind. When dealing with computational reading methods, it is easy to encounter an aesthetic/teleological opposition to stylometry from some quarters.
Today, my peer-reviewed journal article on the publishing history of the two substantially different versions of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was published. You can read the full article in all its open access glory at the Open Library of Humanities . There’s also a press release about the work on Birkbeck’s main site. The Guardian has also run a great article with additional comments from David Mitchell.
Something that occurred to me about the Stern review of REF and the proposed non-portability of research outputs is how this changes the relationship of funding to researchers vs. funding an environment. I will note that I have some qualms, in theoretical (but not political) terms, about such future prediction of excellence through peer review. But that’s what REF does.
My short book in the Object Lessons series, Password , is released today, published by Bloomsbury. It’s available to buy in all the usual places. All author royalties will be donated to Arthritis Research UK. When I first saw the Object Lessons series, I felt I wanted to write something for it. It wasn’t, originally, going to be Password , though. I initially suggested “trade” as the subject.
Lord Stern’s review of the Research Excellence Framework is out today in the UK. Not as exciting as the fact that my book is also out today, I know, but still a marginally important publication, I suppose. The biggest recommended change in the report is that institutional submissions be decoupled from researchers. In other words, institutions must submit all research-active staff BUT not every researcher has to submit four outputs.
One of the aspects of the Stern review that has attracted the most attention from my Twitter stream is the non-portability of research outputs. What this means is that institutions cannot poach staff from elsewhere and use their outputs to return to REF. Now, there’s a problem with Stern at the moment in that he doesn’t say what will happen with ECR/Ph.D. student outputs when they move to their first post with a research element.
We have a third-party Angular app and want to override the isolate scopes that are provided by its directives. We don’t want to modify the original app. How can we do this? We use a decorator in our app controller to specify that only the code in the local app should be run.
As part of the translation platform we’re building, I needed to implement the following workflow: If the DOM has been modified previously, then restore the DOM and run the substitution function. If the DOM hasn’t been modified, then just run the substitution function. The problem was that whenever I ran $(“body”).html(this.original_document); in the first of these cases, the javascript would stop executing.
Continuing my post from yesterday, one of the interface components that we want to work is that, when a user clicks a paragraph, the first sentence is selected so that they can immediately begin translating, seamlessly hitting enter to move to the next sentence etc. I’ve been working on this while my colleague has been creating the sidebar interface. It turns out, though, that selecting a specified sentence of text in javascript is not easy.
